Sandbox Residency
A mold-breaking model for new music
The SPCO Sandbox is a new kind of composer residency program which aims to build a community of curiosity, exploration and collaboration around new music by inviting composers to develop new works in a collaborative process with the orchestra over the course of a season. The idea of placing a composer at the creative center of an orchestra is not new. Indeed, it is this very arrangement that proved such fertile creative ground for composer Franz Joseph Haydn, who famously said of his time embedded with the Esterházy court orchestra that:
As head of an orchestra, I could try things out, observe what creates a good effect and what weakens it, and thus revise, make additions or cuts, take risks. I was cut off from the world, nobody in my vicinity could upset my self-confidence … I had no choice but to become original.
In the 2026.27 season, the SPCO premieres the works of three Sandbox composers-in-residence, including Jon Deak, Gabriela Lena Frank and Chen Yi.
Past Sandbox composers include Valerie Coleman (2024.25 season), Clarice Assad (2023.24 season) and Viet Cuong (2022.23 season).
2026-27 Season
Zachary Cohen Premieres Deak’s Bass Concerto
NOVEMBER 13-14, 2026
Step into the SPCO Sandbox for the world premiere of an imaginative fairytale in the form of a concerto for double bass! Developed over the course of two seasons for his Sandbox Composer Residency, Jon Deak’s newest work, Under a Spell, invites listeners on a whimsical journey performed by Principal Bass Zachary Cohen and guided by narrator Bill Gordh. As the former Associate Principal Bass of the New York Philharmonic and “a composer-performer who has learned to make stringed instruments ‘talk’” (The Washington Post), Deak brings a lifelong familiarity of the instrument to his music and teachings.
Frank’s Sandbox Premiere with Mei-Ann Chen
FEBRUARY 19-21, 2027
Experience the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with Sandbox Composer-in-Residence Gabriela Lena Frank, the SPCO and The Great Northern. As a composer, Frank’s body of work centers climate change, community, and the role of the artist in stewarding change in the face of a heating planet.
Her Sandbox premiere is similarly ecologically fixated, ruminating on the legacy of John James Audubon, the French American writer and ornithologist who inspired the modern conservation movement. In collaboration with poet and librettist J. Drew Lanham, whose essay “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?” inspired this project, Frank grapples with the idea of complicated legacies, the “consequences of entangled histories,” and how they shape the present. In this new song cycle for baritone and chamber orchestra, Ballad of John James Audubon and the Runaway: An American Tragedy Ignored and Retold, Frank and Lanham tell the lesser-known story of Audubon and his legacy of racism.
Cassie Pilgrim Premieres Chen Yi’s Oboe Concerto
MAY 21-22, 2027
A journey, years in the making. In 2020, having bonded over a shared cultural heritage rooted in southern China, SPCO Principal Oboe Cassie Pilgrim gave the world premiere of composer Chen Yi’s Elegy for Solo Oboe — a mournful response to the ongoing pandemic that we livestreamed from an empty hall. In Melodies from Home, her newest oboe concerto written for Cassie, Chen Yi returns to the universal exploration of family and culture, of connection and nostalgia. Led by conductor Cosette Justo Valdés in her SPCO debut, this program offers an escape into serenity through its soft, woodwind melodies, pastoral strings and wondrous harp.
SPCO Sandbox Composer Residencies are made possible with generous project support from:
Amphion Foundation
The Aaron Copland Fund for Music
Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University
David and Karen Olson Family Foundation
Justus and Elizabeth Schlichting
Nara Fund
New Music USA